IS it racist for rabbis to rule that Jews should not rent to non-Jews in Jewish neighborhoods in Israel?
This is an open-and-shut question, isnt it?
We all know that it was racism for whites not to rent to blacks in certain neighborhoods in Denver, even through the 1950s.
Jews, too, were caught in these covenants.
The civil rights movement was based on the proposition that Jim Crow, that is, segregation, was wrong.
Separate but equal public schools were racist and wrong, said the Supreme Court of the US in 1954 in Brown v. the Board of Education.
This landmark in American history was the culmination of years of effort by idealists and, at the same time, spurred further progress that ultimately led to the demise of segregated restaurants, segregated drinking fountains, segregated baseball leagues i.e., a segregated society.
At the very moment when Israels very existence is being questioned, said Rabbi Robert Orkand, president of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, Israel must not add fuel to that fire by allowing statements or acts that are racist in nature.
Abe Foxman of the ADL was much more blunt. He said: It is outrageous and unacceptable that rabbis across Israel are promoting blatant discrimination against non-Jews.
Surely, we are not going to revisit segregation now, are we?
Arab Israelis: Not by Design
ACTUALLY, weve been revisiting it at least since 1947. Then, the UN Nations proposed the partition of Palestine into a separate Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arabs rejected the deal, but this is irrelevant to this discussion. The key here is the perspective of Jewish leaders including contemporary ones in both Israel and the Diaspora on that partition plan.
It was the original two-state solution.
Except for some Satmar chasidic types on the right and some secular Jews on the left, no one I know rejects the idea of a separate Jewish state. I would argue that if you think through the implications of a separate Jewish state, and if one of those implications is that it is not racist, then the rabbinic ruling on rentals is pretty much the same philosophy. Not exact, but close.
So, are we throwing overboard the heroic achievements of the civil rights movement? No. Just this: The Jewish state is a complex animal in a way that the US is not.
As follows:
The only reason why there are Arab citizens in Israel is due to the erratic, unplanned patterns of both Jewish and Arab settlement in Palestine prior to 1948; and to the military vagaries of Israels War of Independence in 1948.
No one neither Jewish nor Arab leaders of the time purposely drew boundaries of the new Jewish state in a way that included a minority of Arab citizens.
In fact, military strategy in that war was designed, in part, to increase the contiguous Jewish settlement and to exclude, as much as possible, Arab settlements.
Neither Jew nor Arab envisioned a Jewish state with an Arab minority. The entire thrust of pre-1948 modern Zionism was to build as large a Jewish majority in Palestine as possible, although the founders of Israel welcomed its Arab minority in its Declaration of Independence.
No Jewish leader at the time of Israels founding accepted the idea that an independent, wholly Jewish state was racist. It was, simply, an opportunity for the Jewish nation to enjoy the fruits of political sovereignty; that is, to resemble the other nations (a secular vision), or to become a light unto the other nations (a religious version), or, more basically, to find a refuge after the Holocaust.
A separate Jewish state is why Israel has its unique Law of Return, guaranteeing any Jew anywhere the right of citizenship in Israel. The citizenship of non-Jews in Israel is purely an accident of the 1948 war and of earlier policies, both Jewish and Arab; and not an inherent right in the eyes of the Zionist left, center or right.
Loyal vs. Disloyal Minorities
WE arrive at the crux: The argument for an independent Jewish state is exactly the Jewish argument for a two-state solution. You have heard it loud and clear since the Oslo peace process began in 1993; and you have heard especially from the Zionist left: We dont want Arab citizens of Israel to take over Israel by multiplying faster than the Jewish citizens. We fear the demographic bomb. Give back the territories in which Arabs live. Keep Israel Jewish.
To keep Israel Jewish is a big motivation behind the Jewish push for a Palestinian state.
But why?
Whats the big deal if there are more Arabs than Jews in Israel?
The answer invariably contains some form of affirmation of the Jewish character of Israel Jews need to be with other Jews. Because:
Jews cannot sustain their religion otherwise.
Or: Jews cannot sustain their Jewish secular culture otherwise.
Or: Jews cannot sustain their history otherwise.
Or: Jews cannot sustain Hebrew as a spoken language otherwise.
Or: Jews cannot guarantee that they will not be persecuted otherwise.
Or: Jews cannot sustain their Diaspora communities otherwise.
Everybody has a different reason why Israel must remain Jewish, but whatever the reason, there is not a large gap if there is any gap at all between all these arguments and between Israeli Jews who say: The Jewish character of my particular Israeli neighborhood will be radically changed if Arabs come to constitute a significant minority, or a majority, in the neighborhood.
Now, I am not clear whether the intent of the rabbinical ruling is to prohibit Israeli Jews from renting to Arabs or to any non-Jew. Certainly, it would be difficult to argue that Jewish law prohibits renting to any non-Jew in Israel. That said, the separation of neighborhoods (and villages and cities) is already the norm for both the Jewish and the non-Jewish sectors in Israel.
Should this separation end? I am not aware of any Jewish or Arab political leader in Israel, on any side of the political spectrum, including the Israeli left, who advocates that the Arab villages within Israel be essentially dismantled via the unrestricted rental of the homes therein to Israelis.
But wait, arent separate living spaces, be they Arab or Jewish, the same as Jim Crow?
No, and for two reasons.
First, generally, in the Middle Eastern culture of Palestine, ethnic and religious identity plays a far more visceral and instinctive role than in republican democracies. In Israel, this instinct for separate ethnic enclaves plays itself out in separate Jewish, and separate Arab, villages, towns and cities. By choice, on both sides.
Second, and more to the point, significant segments of the Arab minority in Israel are not faithful citizens of Israel. They take every opportunity to kill Israelis.
Recent case in point: Since the tragic Carmel Forest fire three weeks ago, there have been some 15 attempts at arson by Palestinian Arabs.
In the US, black soldiers coming out of WW II military units asked: If we can die for our country, why cant we have equal rights in it? Minorities, including blacks, are loyal citizens of the US.
In Israel, the same cannot be said for the significant terrorist and would be terrorist elements among Israeli Arabs. For example, they do not and would not serve in the IDF.
It is frequently summed up this way: An Arab can walk down the street in an Israeli Jewish city without fear of being molested. A Jew cannot walk down the street in an Israeli Arab city without taking his life in his hands.
No Disagreement on Principle
OK. So what does all this have to do with the prohibition of renting apartments, scattered throughout the country, to a non-Jew or non-Jewish family?
Nothing and everything.
On the nothing level, the recent rabbinic prohibition is making a mountain out of a molehill. Whats the big deal if a Jew and an Arab live next to each other in Israel?
Isnt this simply the normal, decent thing to do in fact, more than that, an opportunity to build human bridges?
True enough. It is indeed unfortunate that the issue even needs to be raised.
The reason why the issue is raised why nothing is also everything is because of the tremendous change in Israeli Arab attitudes since the beginning of the second intifada; and because of the influx of non-Jews into Israel in the recent decade or so.
There is a reason why such a rabbinic prohibition was not issued a decade ago. We are no longer talking about an isolated, happy, normal human interaction here or there. Were talking about intensified hostility and a new demographic threat to the Jewish character of Israel.
It is a universal (or near universal) position in the Jewish community that there should be a limitation on the number of black Africans and other non-Jews who may immigrate to Israel. People might disagree on the numbers, but not on the principle.
The basis of this principle is that Jews have a right to a Jewish state, and a right to preserve it as such. Therefore, a town of, say, 50,000 Jewish inhabitants that becomes, over five years, a town of 100,000 inhabitants, 50,000 of whom are not Jews (be they Africans, Arabs or others), is no longer preserving a Jewish state.
This is what the rabbis are pointing out, albeit with the diplomacy of the proverbial bull in the china shop.
And this is what others actually agree with if they think through their advocacy of a separate Palestinian state.
The implication of the current outrage directed at the rabbis for their racism is this: a one-state solution.
No more Jewish state of Israel.
Rather, a single state of Israels current and future citizens, without regard to the loss of a Jewish majority.
The American civil rights paradigm is implicitly rejected in the affirmation of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
No one has been able to square the circle of keeping Israel Jewish and keeping Israel democratic other than by policies that radically limit the number of non-Jews in Israel. This is exactly the policy of the Israeli left, the Israeli center and most of the Israeli right in the proposed two-state solution.
The principle behind this policy is the same one that would radically limit the number of Arabs in a given Israeli neighborhood, village or town, as the rabbis ruled.
An Analogy
PERMIT me to add a bit of personal context to the issue of ethnically separate enclaves in Israel. I will attempt an analogy which, I admit, is not perfect, and also is difficult to grasp because it has almost no toehold in the Diaspora. It is foreign to almost all Diaspora Jewish communities. Still, I make the attempt.
When we came to Israel, where we lived for more than a decade, we moved into a religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. I had never heard of such a living arrangement. At the beginning, I was skeptical. Why dont the religious and non-religious all live together?
I soon found out that the arrangement was preferred by many on both sides of the religious divide. The unobservant Jews had a very different idea of their one day off Shabbat and wanted the freedom to express it in their own way. Many of them found secular neighborhoods congenial for this, and religious neighborhoods uncongenial.
Similarly, the religious Jews felt comfortable with a holistic Sabbath-observant atmosphere.
The solution, in many places of Jerusalem, became separate religious and non-religious neighborhoods. It worked for both.
Beyond the immediate, pragmatic arrangement of separate neighborhoods, I found that Judaism flourishes in a holistic religious environment in a way I had never experienced in the Diaspora.
In Israel, there is a re-creation of that East European, affective community described so beautifully in the classic study of the shtetl, Life is With People.
Even those Jews who dont live in such a community in Israel benefit from it, and not just because it fosters close to a zero percent intermarriage rate.
They benefit, for example, through the Sabbath holiness that descends on the cities and towns of Israel in a way that is not felt in the Diaspora.
That is because of an internally strengthened Judaism that cares enough to see that the Israeli people have the access to a general Shabbat atmosphere, whatever their personal level of observance may or may not be.
Holistic communities are far from perfect. One of their hazards is internal dissension over styles of Jewish observance even among the halachically committed.
Nonetheless, these communities are worth preserving.
Heres the analogy to the present issue. On a much larger scale, the rabbis are arguing for a holistic Israel. A holistic Jewish state. It may not share a common religious basis, but it does share a more general, Jewish basis, and it is worth preserving. A holistic Jewish state is the essence of the affirmation of the Jewish character of Israel.
BEFORE issuing culture-bound denunciations of the rabbis ruling, based on a different American reality, critics should ponder the complex nature of a Jewish state, the goal of a separate Palestinian state, and the way that internally strong Jewish communities are actually preserved.
Here is a case where it is easy to be right, but difficult to face the real issues.
Now, it may well be that the rabbis who issued their rental ban have overstepped their bounds, in both political wisdom and actual halachic reasoning, as the preeminent Rabbis Yosef S. Eliashiv and Aharon Lichtenstein have said. Even if so, the critics of the rabbis remain with their own obligation to come up with a solution to the increasingly tenuous Jewish character of Israel.
Simply to continue to argue for a two-state solution is insufficient, since such a solution is not going anywhere fast. It is easy to criticize the rabbis and the rental ban, but what is the alternate solution?
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
